Category Archives: App Creation

Montpellier, France — September 6, 2016 — Rakuten, a leading global Internet company in partnership with a digital software pioneer Aquafadas entered the interactive magazine apps market with its new product: Rakuten Magazine app launched on the 9th of August 2016. When there are multiple digital catalogues for the EMEA and American readers, e-magazines are less present in this part of the globe. An opportunity that cannot be given a miss!

Imagine 200 magazines, 11 genres, available via an easy-to-use mobile app, all accessible thanks to a very appealing “all you can eat” subscription plan? Combine it with the Rakuten clients base of 100 million existing active customers. The opportunities are endless.

The app is available in Japan and accessible on both iOS and Android devices. Aquafadas has provided a technological frame including: the cloud based app infrastructure and digital enrichment and conversion tools. Their technical solutions have been optimised and adapted in order to meet the needs of the audience and provide stable and highly secure backend as well as a highly flexible user interface.

Matthieu Kopp, CTO, Aquafadas : “It’s the first time when our Aquafadas software enabled to transform and contain so much content in one single app. We’re talking about 200 magazines and this is a wonderful number of titles and also for us – tech experts – this is a powerful amount of data needed to be processed. We’re expecting an impressive adoption rate aiming at millions of readers in the next few years. And whilst we’re waiting impatiently for users reactions and feedback, we’re already working on next features. We have lots of great enhancements in the pipeline that will no doubt bring digital magazines experience in Japan to the next level.

”About Aquafadas: A highly successful French Tech start up, a part of the internet giant Rakuten group. In 2016 they have celebrated its 10 years anniversary. The company started as a leader in Mac software designed to create personal photos and videos animations. Following iPhone touch launch, they became key players in digitisation of comics afterwards moving towards a partnership with well known publishers helping them in transition from glossy magazines to stunning mobile content and apps. Today, they are one of the key enterprise mobility enablers with their creative publishing tools for the business world. Amongst their clients they list: Adecco, Deloitte, VW, Audi, Turkish Airlines, Audi, Havas, Shuiesha, Prêt à Manger and many more.

It held a “Code Jam” on the New York Stock Exchange floor, which was basically a jam session for coders. A trio of developers set up shop and programmed whatever struck their fancy, app after app, and streamed it all live to the internet via Amazon’s Twitch.

But Kenny Polcari, a 55-year-old stockbroker who’s been with the NYSE for the past 35 years, didn’t know any of that, he tells Business Insider. He just knew that there was some kind of tech IPO that day, and that three people were setting up computers on the trading floor for some reason.

Before the opening bell rang, Polcari decided to indulge his curiosity, and wandered over to the trio to investigate. Twilio developer evangelist Rob Spectre explained that they were there to show off the company’s voice and text technology — and, seeing Polcari’s interest, offered to teach him how to code, once the Code Jam was officially underway.

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Adobe has provided free iOS apps for creating visually rich social media posts, web-based stories and animated videos for a while, in the shape of Adobe Post, Slate and Voice respectively. The creative software giant has now updated these mobile apps and integrated them with a new web app called Adobe Spark, renaming the iOS offerings Spark Post, Spark Page and Spark Video.

According to Aubrey Cattell, head of next-generation products at Adobe, “Standing out on social media, creating engaging visual content — that’s pretty hard. Most people know what they want to achieve, but they lack the design skills, and the time, to create beautiful content that’ll look good on any device. That in turn makes it hard for them to stand out online and drive deeper engagement with their audience.”

You can use the new Spark web app to create all three types of content — social posts/graphics, web stories and animated videos — on desktops, laptops or any other platform that can run a browser. You can log into Spark via Facebook or Google, or with your Adobe ID, whereupon your projects will sync between devices

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Google’smotivation to keep app users safe as they search for information and explore new ways to make their life easier through mobile devices points to helping consumers feel secure and free from malware andhackers. The safer consumers feel, the more they will use the apps and mobile Web and interact with branded content and paid-search ads.

In Google’s second annual report on the state of Android security, thecompany says it now scans six billion Android apps daily on smartphones around the world to look for potentially harmful apps (PHAs), but another report suggests Android apps still fall into ahigher-risk category. Too many are at risk of leaking consumer data.

It means Google now scans 400 million devices daily using automated systems to support Google Mobile Services, with theautomated system protecting users who install apps from sources other than Google Play. In 2015, PHAs were installed on less than 0.15% of devices that only get apps from Google Play.

Includeall devices in the Android ecosystem using Google’s services, such as apps from third-party app stores, and this rises to 0.5%, up from 1% from the prior year.

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The NFL’s Minnesota Vikings will offer its fans a way to navigate its new stadium, order beer and buy tickets in its relaunched app.

The Minnesota Vikings are tackling opening a new stadium and launching a new app this coming season.

The National Football League team will relaunch its app at a party during the NFL Draft 2016 on Thursday, April 28, says John Penhollow, vice president of corporate and technology partnerships for Minnesota Vikings Football LLC. The new app will work in conjunction with the team’s new indoor stadium, U.S. Bank Stadium, which will open this summer.

The new app will allow fans to purchase tickets, enter the stadium via a mobile ticket, purchase food and drinks, watch video replays, earn points in a loyalty program, buy merchandise and navigate the stadium with turn-by-turn directions, Penhollow says. The team’s current app has none of this functionality and only provides content, such as news and information about the team, he says.

Without any of these features, the Vikings’ current app has amassed 450,000 downloads since its launch in 2012, Penhollow says. Once the new app launches fans with the current iteration of the Viking’s app will receive an alert to update their apps. Assuming this large base of fans updates the app, Penhollow hopes the app can reach more than a million downloads.

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An Open Plea for OpenEFT

by Peter Meirs

OpenEFT is a new open source standard for packaging and exchanging digital content that will be officially released by IDEAlliance at the end of September. The format can be used by content creators, advertisers and digital newsstands to publish digital magazines on tablets. OpenEFT is free to use and carries no restrictions on how it is customized or distributed. The OpenEFT format was created by the industry to give publishers an alternative to proprietary formats that are commercially licensed and locked down.

In the early days of digital publishing, almost every technology solution was an interdependent mix of code and proprietary hardware. Technology providers offered workflow solutions to publishers that could save OpenEFT_logothem time and increase their productivity. The cost of these systems would often exceed $1 million, but publishers made the investment in hopes of reducing significant labor costs.

This was the model for selling publishing systems in the 1990s, when technology companies made huge profits on single vendor solutions. In his book, “The Innovators Dilemma,” Clayton Christensen described the risks that successful companies carry when they focus on optimizing their specialized products, rather than anticipating changes in market demand. Those changes happened quickly, and they profoundly disrupted the publishing technology model.

Scitex, a provider of advanced graphic design systems in the 1980s and ’90s, sold expensive, proprietary workstations and had annual sales approaching $700 million at its peak. When Adobe and Quark created similar applications that ran on inexpensive hardware, the market shifted, and Scitex’s sales dropped by 85 percent. The captive supply model didn’t work in a world where buyers could choose less expensive alternatives.

While it wasn’t exactly a move to standardization, platforms like Apple’s Power Mac and Workgroup servers provided an open environment for running interoperable applications. This led to the creation of best-of-breed publishing workflows that usually included software from multiple vendors. Interoperability drove a competitive marketplace and solutions truly became cheaper, faster and better.

When Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, the focus on print workflows tilted heavily toward digital. Publishers scrambled to adapt their processes so they could also produce tablet versions. Woodwing, a company that provided print workflow systems, created a method for packaging content for its tablet apps. A year later, Woodwing opened its well implemented OFIP format to the public, free of charge. It was a noble attempt to standardize interactive publications across the industry.

In the short term, many providers and publishers benefitted from the new “OFIP standard.” This license-free format allowed third-party software companies to build their own tablet solutions, providing more choice to buyers. While the demand for magazines on tablets was still in question, at least the process to produce them was moving forward.

This is where the story turns. Opening OFIP to the public was not the same thing as making it an open source format. Woodwing offered its specification on a license-free basis, but it was not a true open source format under the control of a vendor-independent standards organization. As quickly as it was given, OFIP could be taken away. And that’s exactly what happened.

In October 2011, Adobe and Woodwing announced an alliance that involved, among other things, a “retirement” of the OFIP format. This meant all the niche players who had built solutions around OFIP were no longer able to create products using that format. Instead of using OFIP, Adobe’s DPS solution used a new format called .Folio. Adobe’s terms of service clearly restricts the use of the .Folio format to drive third-party viewers.

The sudden lack of an open standard for packaging and exchanging content prompted some industry players to approach IDEAlliance, a not-for-profit membership organization that supports the media supply chain. This resulted in an IDEAlliance-led effort to create a new, open format called OpenEFT.

The mission of OpenEFT is to serve as a universal format that will allow users to:

Publish reader applications to a broad spectrum of platforms, with a single set of reader-independent XML based instructions.

Receive production-ready interactive ads from brands or agencies, packaged with all required media files, enhancements and business data.

Gather user metrics for both editorial and advertising for any analytics reporting model.

The value proposition for OpenEFT is far-reaching. Its adoption by publishers, technology providers, advertisers and digital newsstands would enable a frictionless supply chain that can allow unrestricted development and optimization of tablet applications. This would ultimately lead to a better consumer reading experience. Many companies that lost business when their OFIP-based products became unsupportable can again compete in an open marketplace.

Despite what some may think, OpenEFT was not created to compete with Adobe or with any other established industry player. IDEAlliance’s key objective is to re-establish a standardized format that was lost to industry with the deprecation of OFIP.

Publishing companies are desperately hoping that their subscribers will support paid digital editions. Unfortunately, the present model for producing digital renditions has not generated much consumer interest or publisher revenue. Demand will only happen when the perceived value of digital products matches that of print.

An industry standard technology like OpenEFT will enable a competitive marketplace that can innovate and disrupt the present model, much like Adobe and Quark did 15 years ago. Best of all, unlike OFIP, OpenEFT is a truly open format, maintained by a vendor-independent industry association. Industry players can confidently use the format to create, modify and exchange content without fear of losing access to the technology.

OpenEFT offers a great opportunity to increase both innovation and interoperability across the digital magazine supply chain. The question is whether publishers, advertisers, distributors and solution providers will agree to implement the format. The bigger question is, “Why wouldn’t they?”

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Many marketers have made no secret of their desire to target ads to mobile users based on their location.

But a new study indicates that geo-location targeting — even when theoretically “anonymous” — raises significant privacy concerns. For the study, researchers at MIT and the Catholic University of Louvain studied fifteen months’ worth of “anonymized” data gleaned from 1.5 million people over a 15-month period. From that trove of information, the researchers concluded that “human mobility traces are highly unique.”

The report states: “In a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”

Even when the researchers “coarsened” the data, they still found that people could be identified. “Hence,” the paper continues, “even coarse datasets provide little anonymity.”

That conclusion doesn’t mean that geo-location targeting is illegal, only that it’s probably not anonymous in any meaningful sense. But any companies who say in privacy policies that they collect anonymous geo-location data collection might need to rethink that language.

Overall, the report offers yet another piece of evidence that individuals can be identified based on “anonymous” data — a prospect that privacy experts like Paul Ohm have warned of for years.

To some extent, this has already happened. The most famous example occurred in 2006, when AOL released three months worth of search queries for 650,000 users. The searches alone provided clues to some of those users’ identities.

That’s not the only incident. Several years ago, two computer scientists at the University of Texas reported that it was possible to identify users by comparing reviews of obscure movies on Netflix with reviews on Imdb.com that were published under screennames. Last year, a federal prosecutor was identified as an anonymous commenter at the Times-Picayune‘s NOLA.com, based on the vocabulary he used in his posts.

Feed-Driven Apps
Live app editions are powered by XML and JSON feeds which means publishers’ existing online content can be output into beautiful and stylish editions, optimised for reading on iOS tablet devices.

Customise and Enhance
Tailor your app to fit your brand by adding logos, colours, fonts, background images and more. You can also control how your content is categorised by choosing which sections appear in your app.

Multiple Template Options
Choose from a library of templates and a range of options to meet your internal resource and content. You can also create your own custom front covers and article layouts using PageSuite’s unique tools.

Deliver 24/7
Publishers have complete control over the scheduling of their Live editions and all past editions are automatically sent to the archive so subscribers can catch up on any news that they’ve missed via the edition timeline.

Drive Revenue
Live Apps feature Newsstand integration and offer full integration with existing subscriber databases. There are also multiple advertising and sponsorship opportunities with interactive full-page interstitial adverts and MPU slots.

Personalised Content
Readers can instantly access articles they want to read about by choosing which feeds populate their app. Publishers also have the opportunity to further monetise content by offering additional feeds made available through in-app payments.

This lens offers objective information that compares tablet computers (like the Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy) with dedicated e-reader devices (like the Kindle or Nook). Each type of device has its own pros and cons, and the type of device that is better for you will depend on what you want from your personal electronics.

Below you will find an explanation of the basic (but important) differences between tables and ereaders, and then more detailed information about the most popular current devices. Mobile computing and reading is really an exiting new type of technology